Sustainable Urban Planning: In Search for Alternatives

Dear Colleagues,

Urban Planning is crucial in advancing sustainable urban development, yet existing conventions are still leading to uneven and problematic plans in many locations. While progressive discourses highlight urban diversity, inclusion, democracy and green infrastructure, actual plans prioritize economic growth, and advance ad-hoc entrepreneurial projects that often compromise part, or all of these goals. Meanwhile, cities' futures and their capacity to accommodate diverse citizens are threatened by growing environmental risks, rising housing prices, and deepening inequalities.

Scholars criticized the depoliticized ways in which governments present threats as common to all, while limiting the scope of the change, and the debate, to the existing staus quo (Swynegedouw, 2010). Scholars also pointed at compromises to urban inclusion and democracy made by current “experts’ management of necessity” (Davidson and Iveson 2014, 4), and showed how these experts exclude alternative knowledge(s), perspectives and visions (Raco and Savini, 2019).

The goal of this special issue is to imagine such visions. We aim to conceive possible links between environmental and social solutions, and to provide new ideas for sustainable planning and architecture. Ideas will critically address previous visions, and relate to knowledge and ethics, democratic planning procedures, scales of intervention and participation, spatial plans and socio-spatial implications.

Davidson, M. and Iveson, K. (2014), Recovering the politics of the city: From the ‘post-political city’ to a ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geography, Progress in Human Geography, 39, 543–559.

Raco, M. and Savini, F. (Eds). (2019). Introduction, Conclusion, Planning and Knowledge: How New Forms of Technocracy Are Shaping Contemporary Cities. Policy Press, Bristol.

Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse forever? Theory, culture & society, 27(2-3): 213-232.‏

Prof. Dr. Talia Margalit
Guest Editor

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